Oaxaca Women Tap for Hope with Their Fingernails

By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca

October 17, 2006

Let’s look at ten recent developments here:

1. Oaxaca’s interior secretary issued another ultimatum for the teachers to return to classrooms today or face the consequences. This is the fourth such ultimatum. Each one has carried a threat – either for loss of contract pay for the school year, loss of future pay offers (including rescinding an increase in base wages for Oaxacan workers, which the teachers had fought for and which would benefit all salaried workers), the firing of every teacher who doesn’t show up, or the use of armed forces. Today Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the Institutional Revolutionary Party-dominated Mexican National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE in its Spanish initials) but also close to PAN president-elect Felipe Calderón, threatened to cut Section 22, the Oaxacan local of the SNTE, from the union body. Section 22 referred to this as a “declaration of war,” and a parallel national committee is now on the table. Omar Olivera, spokesperson for the teachers camped in Mexico City outside the National Senate, repeated his repudiation of Gordillo as leader of SNTE. He stated that the behavior of Gordillo is an “action of ‘Calderonism’ to break the Oaxaca movement.”

2. Over the weekend in the capital city of Oaxaca, during a forty-eight hour period, ten different marches took place. They followed a public funeral in the zocalo’s central pavilion for Alejandro García, who died from a gunshot wound to the head while he was at the barricade in Colonia Alemán, bringing coffee to the night team. A car with four military men in civilian clothes, recently seen leaving a local cantina, tried to beak the barricade. During the ensuing scuffle two members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials) were shot, the second victim in the arm. The accused soldier, Jonathan Ríos Vásquez, declared himself innocent.

3. The federal senators who visited Oaxaca to check on the state government’s “loss of powers” opined that there seems to be increased rancor in Oaxaca. According to Noticias of October 16, the senators, Alejandro González Alcocer (PAN), Tomás Torres Mercado (PRD) and Ramiro Hernández García (PRI), though not drawing conclusions about ungovernability, nevertheless reached that astonishing conclusion.

As I understand it, the Mexican constitution says that the Senate can declare the state “ungovernable” by observing that the three branches of government are no longer functioning. In other words, with state powers having disappeared, the Senate sees that basic functions are no longer being carried out.

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